On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post introducing you to some of the extra features in the popular phpMyAdmin tool, how to enable them and their use.

PhpMyAdmin is one of the most used tools when it comes to managing your databases. By default, PhpMyAdmin does a great job. However, it comes with a lot of handy extra extensions which can be easily activated. In this article, we will activate these extensions and see what they can do for us.

Among the extra features he talks about are things like:

Bookmarking

Clickable links for relations

Exporting relation information to PDF

Adding comments to column names

Viewing a history of queries run through the tool

Working with users and groups

There's lots more he covers too, so be sure to check out the rest of the post for more details and screenshots of the UI changes that come with them.

David Coallier has shared a quick tip today about the PHP/SimpleXML/CDATA combination and the creation of auto-generated classes.

I thought, hey I wonder how long it'd take in php.. so I was
working on it and I actually couldn't remember all those funny extra
parameters in simplexml_* so if you are googling and cannot find
something that says exactly what you want well here it is.

His example includes two additional parameters in his simplexml_load_string call to handle the CDATA section correctly and make accessing the data inside the block just like getting at anything else in the object.

Note that Rob Richards has also commented on the post that this issue was corrected a while back and it shouldn't be needed anymore, but could effect older versions of the SimpleXML functionality.

Throughout the blogosphere I'm always seeing these blogs, that while they look great, are horribly slow and overburdened. Over the past few months I have become somewhat of a website optimization specialist, bringing my own site from an over 250kB homepage to its current 34kB.

I will help you achieve some of the same success with a few, powerful tips. Most of these are common sense, but I can't stress their importance enough. I will concentrate on the website and not the server in this article, as there are too many things to discuss when it comes to server optimization.

The five tips mentioned include "Reduce Overall Latency by Reducing HTTP Requests" and "Compression", each with a paragraph or so of explaination as to what it is and how to implement it. There's even a PHP-specific one that talks about a paring down of the bits of functionality that really aren't needed.